Google sent me a coupon for $100 to use on AdWord recently. AdWords is for advertising your own product and is not to be confused with AdSense which allows you to put ads on your site and earn money from them. But AdWords is pretty confusing even if you know that.

Who’s gonna ignore a coupon for a hundred bucks? Why not try it out on Hailey Hacks, which I often refer to as my experiment in business models. So I set up an AdWords account and started goofing around with keywords and almost immediately gave up in confusions and reached out to Christopher Guest who is my go-to-guy for anything that has to do with advertising.

Christopher told me there was no point in advertising anything that didn’t have a revenue stream. Hailey Hacks is free on YouTube and various other video sharing sites. What is the point, he wanted to know, of driving traffic to a site that isn’t earning money.

Okay, good point. So in addition to figuring how what keywords to use and how the hell the whole bidding on words works, I decided to build a new little home site for Hailey that I could add AdSense to. Now when I make ads with AdWords, they’ll send clickers to the new site, titled Web Wizardry (but sitting at haileyhacks.blogspot.com.) So let’s see how much I can earn from AdSense from $100 in my AdWords (now $95 because of the activation fee.)

I made three different ads, one for the April Fools videos, one for the Google Maps video and one for the LOLcats video. If you happen to meet one of my ads, please let me know or better yet take a screenshot (you know how to take a screenshot, don’t you? Alt-shift-3.)

Just to see what would happen, I also turned on the pre-roll ad option on the videos over at Blip.tv. So now, the videos have pre-roll, overlay and post-roll ads on them. Soon, hopefully AdSense will be operational and if I have time, maybe I’ll add an Amazon affiliate program while I’m at it.

Lucky I didn’t read this piece about making money on the web by Roger Ebert before I spent my entire Saturday on this.